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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

> The kind of bad emulator that requires game-specific patches instead of getting the emulation correct to begin with, and is embedding the emulator into a binary together with the game. Absolute slop.

There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding where the work to make a simple, consistent, flexible, DRY platform or library isn't really worth it when anyone can press a button and get a variant customized to their needs in minutes.

People playing the game don't care about the elegance of the emulator, and if there is a bug in the slop, they can just have their AI fix it immediately and keep playing.

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Or they can just save their time/money, use a human-crafted emulator, and not deal with their game crashing constantly and all manner of stupid bugs. It is genuinely insane that you believe your average joe video game player would rather spend $100~200 on a subscription, prompt for an emulator, then prompt it over and over to fix showstopping bugs rather than playing something that works for free, and yet that is what you are supposing when you suggest they "don't care" about the "elegance" of the emulator.

You would at least have a point if people were slopping out emulators for things that didn't exist but, surprise surprise, we still don't have a Switch 2 emulator. Almost like this entire notion is a complete fraud and all it can do is regurgitate existing code poorly.

Sounds like you've got an axe to grind

I certainly do. I'm paying 300, 400% more for my PC/server parts and HN has been ruined because of fraudsters selling a con, among many other undesirable side effects. People like yourself selling incoherent hype like "people will just prompt an emulator for themselves" are part of the problem. It would be weird if I didn't have an axe to grind with hucksters doing their best to ruin things for everyone else.

At first, the handmade emulators were just as buggy and crashed all the time. That’s just normal during development. With AI tools, however, you now have the advantage of being able to theoretically create a comprehensive testing environment where, eventually, an LLM will play the games on its own and fix any bugs it finds, so that the user ends up with a nearly perfect emulator.

The Switch 2 is a completely different story than other consoles. To create an emulator for it, you'd have to be able to reverse-engineer the Switch 2, and that won't be possible until there's a jailbreak.

Good news here, someone claims to have found a userland exploit in at least one game and dumped the game via HDMI capture of visual encoded data. They might be full of it, or we might have a path for Switch2 ROMs.

I say that as a Switch 2 owner with a pretty extensive Nintendo library. I dont actually have any interest in using Switch 2 ROMs this decade, but maybe next.

Source: https://x.com/gezine_dev/status/2100262587263037470

> There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding

Yeah, it feels like we've entered the era of disposable software.

Also I do like how everyone in this thread seemed to immediately and unanimously clock this project as slop.

There have been A LOT of buggy game ports released and immediately abandoned. It's all well and good until you want to actually experience the game as intended. Running into a huge issue that will never be fixed several hours in radicalizes folks pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, all of these slop-ports will wow and amaze people that have zero intent of actually playing the game. They're the software equivalent of clickbait.

yup have you seen that pokemon decompile they just took a random screenshot that makes it look good ... but it was unplayable

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